You know you need marketing, but as a small- to medium-sized business owner, you probably know a lot more about building a successful business, motivating your team, and creating great products or services.

Marketing savvy is necessary — but who has time to get educated?

There’s another problem.

You could be doing a lot of marketing, but if it’s not the right marketing, you’re wasting your money and efforts.

Inbound marketing companies are outrageously successful.

Here’s a quick rundown of how much better they’re faring than you are:

They generate 50 percent more leads that are sales-ready at 33 percent lower cost.

Nurtured leads will purchase 47 percent more than leads that aren’t nurtured.

When businesses use inbound marketing lead nurturing, the majority of them increase opportunities by 15 percent and sales opportunities by 10 percent.

Over 81 percent of shoppers using digital methods reported they were likely to make an additional buy because of receiving targeted emails.

When a businesses increases their blog production from 3 to 5 times per month to 6 to 8 times a month, they can nearly double their leads.

If your business needs an influx of results-oriented marketing, inbound can get you there.

What your marketing probably looks like

Billboard advertising. Radio spots. Direct mail ads. Your website.

These are all effective pieces of the marketing puzzle.

But to get traffic and leads, you need a strategic plan.

You see, marketing can’t operate in a silo.

The pieces need to all fit together to create the final masterpiece: REVENUE.

Inbound marketing companies flip the switch

In the past, successful marketing strategies consisted of trying to find customers and get consumer awareness.

These efforts were focused on the mission of representing your brand.

You engaged customers through demographics and mass advertising.

Your tactics included using a few channels that were isolated from each other and blasting one-point-in-time ads.

Today’s marketing, however, is vastly different. The mission is to:

Represent the customer and his needs.

Get found by these customers.

Engagement involves:

Behavioral marketing.

One-to-one targeting.

The tactics you use include:

Developing continuous relationships.

Integrating marketing channels.

Becoming a company that does inbound marketing shifts your focus away from old tactics to steadily engage in new strategies that drive revenue.

Inbound in action

Inbound uses marketing tactics to get customers to notice you.

You will not longer have to break out the Mixed Martial Arts tactics to chase down customers.

When customers are in the early buying stages of the decision-making process, they’ll learn about your business, how you can solve their problems, why you’re the business to turn to when they’re ready to buy.

Here are some of the channels you’ll use in an inbound marketing campaign:

SEO

Blogging

Social Media

Lead generation

Growth-driven web design

Email

Now, take a look at how all of these inbound puzzle pieces fit together to create a revenue-driving marketing machine:

Attracting. During this phase, you build awareness about your brand and help brand-strangers learn about what you do. These tactics, social media and growth-driven web design for example, grow brand awareness, expose new audiences to your business and drive traffic to your website.

Converting. Now that you’re getting visitors to your website, you can start “converting” them into leads. By creating lead-generating content, such as a free webinar or ebook, you’ll get these visitors to give their personal contact information to you so you can conduct future marketing campaigns.

Closing. With a fresh batch of leads, you’ll guide them through an email autoresponder series, for example, to get them to buy. You can segment your email contacts to deliver value-based content to the right people at the right time — and when they’re ready to buy.

Delighting. Creating a customer base that drives revenue is the first goal. But now that you have customers, you’ll want to nurture these relationships so that your customers turn into brand evangelists — promoting your products and services across the internet.

See how these pieces all play a different yet key role towards the goal of getting traffic, turning traffic into leads, getting leads to buy, and using customers to promote your brand?

It’s not a hodge-podge of hit-or-miss tactics.

Inbound is strategic.

It’s insightful.

It’s responsive.

And it drives revenue.

Plain and simple — but highly effective, and it’s less costly than traditional marketing. Are you ready to shave off 62 percent of your marketing costs?

That’s how much companies save by ditching the old, invasive tactics and implementing a strategic inbound marketing strategy.

What are you waiting for? Want to shift your marketing strategy and become a company that does inbound marketing?

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Maja is passionate about what she does, and she goes “all in,” whether that means crushing a marketing strategy for a client or helping out a friend. With an MBA in Business Management from the University of Latvia and five years experience in marketing, she holds multiple Hubspot certifications. Maja’s marketing approach is organized and systematic, allowing for lots of creativity and freedom. She speaks four languages, and in her free time, this city girl enjoys traveling, hanging out at the beach, discovering new kinds of beer, and coffee.